Scott Burns: Continuing-care retirement communities filling up

SARASOTA,
Fla. — July is not the fashionable time to be in Sarasota. Some of the
restaurants close. Many of the year-round residents book flights to the north.
With the exception of fashionable St. Armands Circle, you needn’t worry about
crowds.

It’s also
difficult to go anywhere without getting wet. This year the usual summer
monsoon season — a daily pattern of sparkling mornings and short, drenching
late-afternoon rains — has somehow transmuted into rain that is random or just
plain unrelenting. It is so unrelenting, in fact, that a waitress complains.
The constant rain, she says, has made customers (and tips) scarce at the
Bearded Clam Waterfront Restaurant and Tiki Bar.

Mostly a
bar and reluctantly a grill, the establishment sits like a gantlet of $4.25
well drinks at the end of the dock where the Sea Gypsy, the boat I am staying
on, is berthed. The price of the well drinks usually works to draw a crowd of
regulars: The group has more teeth than tattoos, but is dressed so the tattoos
can easily be counted.

Your
columnist is aboard the 42-foot trawler as deckhand, cook and friend of the
owner and captain. The captain is hoping the weather will clear enough for a
shakedown cruise following some repairs and replacements.

For me,
it’s also an opportunity to do a spot-check on the real estate market along the
Florida Gulf Coast. The online view from real estate websites is encouraging.
Like the rest of the country, sales are up. Prices are firming. Inventories are
down. There are fewer distress sales.

The adage
about waterfront — that they aren’t making any more of it, so you ought to buy
some — has never been totally true in Florida because the state has
manufactured more waterfront with bulkheads and canals than most entire nations
receive from nature. Even so, one clear message is that anything
waterfront/waterview is back.

The
residue of the Big Real Estate Bust is inland. There, you can still find some
houses, townhouses and condos priced dirt cheap. They are mostly older units
doomed by their lack of granite counters. But the operative word is some.

I
experience the most powerful evidence of recovery further south. Cape Coral and
Fort Myers were widely seen as one of the worst-hit areas of the country, on
par with Las Vegas. In 2008, some friends took me to a dinner party at Shell
Point, the third-largest continuing-care retirement community (CCRC) in
Florida. Located on an enormous piece of land and backed by miles of protected
mangroves, even many of the older, more modestly priced units have stunning
water views.

Shell
Point’s website, www.shellpoint.org, is another virtue: It is direct and
informative, complete with floor plans, pricing and details.

Back
then, I was told that Shell Point had the first vacancies in its history after
decades of having a long waiting list. The waiting list existed in spite of a
six-figure upfront fee to guarantee lifetime care, with smooth on-site
transitions from independent living to assisted living to nursing care. The
ongoing monthly fee and minimum income requirement are also more than most
retirees have.

But that
was history. As the real estate bust started, this upscale community — large
enough to have a golf course, a small marina and four restaurants — started to
have vacancies for the first time, a cause of great concern to some of the
residents.

Why were
they concerned? They had friends on the waiting list. The friends wanted to
move in, but they couldn’t. They had to sell their homes first, but in the
dismal market of 2008 there were no buyers.

On this
trip, I arrive at a small Iona subdivision as a friend in his late 80s finishes
his regular tennis game. He takes me to the Shell Point sales office. He and
his wife have made a reservation deposit. They know many people who already
live there.

I ask
her: “If a busload of people arrived, all wanting to live here, would you have
places for them?”

Ms.
Lepore picks up a clipboard. She holds it high. She scans it up and down.

“Well,
we’ve got 1,200 units and,” she pauses, “ ... 21 vacancies.”

Maybe the
people at the front of the bus could move in. But everyone else would be out of
luck.

Things
change.

SCOTT BURNS is a principal of the Plano-based
investment firm AssetBuilder Inc. His website is www.scottburns.com.— Universal Uclick

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